Kim Bouvy

In June 2010, the book ‘Home’ by VMX Architects was published (SUN Publishers). For this book, I photographed 16 housing projects in the Netherlands designed by VMX in the last 15 years.

Graphic designers Mevis & van Deursen and VMX contacted me because they were looking for a different approach towards architecture photography for their book. In books about architecture, the architecture is most often photographed when still brand new, unblemished and uneffected by use and wear of its inhabitants, therefore showing quite an ‘unreal’ image of architecture. This makes sense, when one considers architecture photography to be an important marketing tool for architects to promote their works with images that pay homage.

The book is also meant to function as a study book. It includes a text by writer and journalist Marina de Vries, who is also living in one of the housing projects by VMX. The book is made out of 16 different chapters, one for each housing project, each consisting of an introduction text, the technical drawings and my images from the project taken inside and outside. The housing projects that I photographed range from building projects still in preperation, commissioned family homes, to large social housing projects.

The book was made in a very short period of time, but still resulted in a challenging book that illustrates a very fresh and open minded attitude towards what architecture and its representation is and how this could be presented in a book in a different way. An aspect that became a focus for my images, was how the inside world of the architecture of VMX and the outside world related to eachother, how inside and outside are experienced in parallel, as a kind of osmosis of the senses.

Having such an open minded architecture firm and Netherlands’ most prominent graphic designers asking me to apply a different approach, photographing their projects in their full functioning existence and giving me freedom to interpret the commission in dialogue with them, was a very exiting challenge and experience.

ISBN 9789461051295
Dutch/English edition
Paperback | 81 images in Full color

324 pages / 146 x 220 mm
€32,50